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Top 10 Personal Computers
BWJones writes "The Houston Chronicle has posted a story by Dwight Silverman on the ten most popular PC's of all time. His inclusions are for the most part accurate, but his rankings confuse me. For instance, he includes 'hobby' computers such as the Altair, but excludes the Apple I and his ranking of the Compaq portable PC at number one ahead of the Altair, Apple I and II, Apple Lisa and Macintosh. Interestingly, the author also skips other significant platforms entirely, such as the Amiga and Atari computers as well as skipping over the much more significant Tandy products, the TRS-80 line of computers which like the Apple I and II had built in BASIC which helped introduce many people to programming."
My first and worst: Trash-80 Model III. 48k, 2 floppies and a built in monochrome screen.
Does anyone know of any other such lists? I would be interested in seeing them. (fp?)
Definitely missing the Amiga on that list. Chuck the "APPLE NEWTON MESSAGE PAD".
IMHO
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Still the best. Use it up to this day.
The Z80 chip could run rings around the Apple 6502 cpu. It's a shame Tandy didn't add basic features like high resolution color graphics and lower case letters. Despite that, the TRS-80 was a great machine and far superior to others from that era for everything except graphics.
he is a journalist, not a fact checker.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Isn't that simply a side effect of having to skip the 11th most popular and onwards if you make a list of the *ten* most popular PCs? Gee.
. . . I'd like to say that Silverman is a continual puzzlement to the computer community on how he keeps his job. There's no reason to put any weight on what he says.
I was sure to find references to my goold old Timex Sinclair 1000, or even my Adam computer, but no! I had to read about Compaq...
Not even a word on the TI 99/4A. Guess I'll have to publish my own list. Actually, I had planned a long time to do a timeline of my computers, see how it respected moore's law. Guess there's no better time then right now to get started.
With 210MB HD, 4MB RAM, and a whopping 25MHz chip. It ran DOS 6.22 and Win 3.1
It made computing a VERY VERY personal experience and taught me patience and anger-management...and the first real appropriate usage of colorful 4-letter words.
I will attest to that statement on the old Apple II machines and its BASIC interpreter, though. It did introduce me to programming. My favorite book at the time was something called "Kids and The Apple" which featured lots of BASIC code samples. If it were a list of the top 10 life-changing PCs, the old Apple II would get my vote as #1.
and the Xbox, PS2, and Sega Dreamcast running Linux?
The only thing was that it was a hand-me down and I got it in 1991 when most people were using Amigas or 386s and 486s. Today my watch probably has more memory than that thing had (I bought a cheap pocket organizer in the mid 1990s that did). You could hook it up to a tape recorder to playback programs. The word processor took about 20 minutes to load and didn't even have word wrap! You had to hit the enter key at the end of every line. And of course typing essays while staring at an old color tv was rather hard on the eyes. By that time Basic was a little retro but it was still interesting from the point of view of someone who had never done any programming before. Of course it also played a mean game of pong as it had a cartridge system for games. :-)
It's top ten most 'IMPORTANT', not popular. Maybe if you actually read the fucking article for understanding first the choices would make more sense to you. They make a lot of sense to me.
Top Ten Reasons 'Top 10 Lists' Suck
10. They usually list items that are still avertised in the meadium of the list. Top ten list of cars for example will never list the Edsel, the Durants or REOs. They will list Honda, Toyota and Fords.
9. Most lists are usually geard to non-enthusiests. They will mention items that most people know about, and won't go too far to explain new, yet important, items.
8. They are filled with lame items so that the list is ten items long.
7. They are filled with duplicates that make the same point.
6. They are filled with duplicated that appempt to make the same point.
5. Top ten lists should really start at Nine and count down to Zero. Especially if they deal with computing or mathmatics.
4. Top ten lists usually forget about the distant past - and only mention items that the reasership is familliar with. Like the list of important historical events that fails to mention items before 1950.
3. Top ten lists get tiring by the seventh item.
2. Top ten lists usually play for novelty - Like a car list wherer the 'flying car' will get mentioned, but the first diesel-engine car won't, even though in the grand scheme of things, the diesel engine is more important - it's considered boreing.
1.5 Some top ten lists will include another item, in order to appear to be cute.
1. Most top 10 lists are lame excuses to try to get attention. Like this one.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Yes the Amiga should be on that list, the others, I don't really agree with.
But you might be forgetting is this is someones list. It isn't the end all and be all of lists, go ahead make your own, write an article about it.
I find it funny that so many people will get all riled up over what a single person wrote.
I still have ye'ole coco I, II, and III (all thoroughly modified of course) squirreled away along with the cassette tape "drive", etc.
I have an early Compaq portable, which, as stated in the article, is more correctly described as luggable for its size. It has an orange plasma screen and still runs dos very happily whenever I decide to boot it up. I have a speech recognition card for it that actually works very well, although it can only recognize pretrained words. It may be old, but it still works great and would be good if someone wants a cheap computer to learn programming.
The Houston Chronicle has posted a story by Dwight Silverman on the ten most popular PC's of all time. - writeup, emphasis added
With that in mind, I'd like to offer my list of the 10 most important personal computers of all time, ranked in order. - linked story, emphasis added
I'd like to take this moment to remind everyone that the average Slashdot user is smarter than the average person, and their reading comprehension is similarly top-notch.
while the compaq was pretty big, im sure the main reason he listed as numero uno is because compaq was based in houston. about ten miles from my house actually. my pick would have been the macintosh, because thats the first computer my dad bought.
lose != loose
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Most business users bought the Microsoft SoftCard and got all the benefits of the Z-80 CPU.
Certainly the Amiga and the Atari ST. First 32-bit computers generally available to the masses.
But how on earth can you not include the Sinclair spectrum (1982)... Or in fact the ZX80/81. Obviously not an author from the UK....
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I may be misremembering, but I thought this portable came out even before the Osborne. It had a multi-line LCD display, ran off 4 "AA" batteries. They are so durable that many are still in use, and it weighed just a few pounds.
How could the Coleco Adam be left off any top ten list? Despite its tendency to rust up on you, it stills stands up as a timeless classic.
Back in the 80s there was a huge difference in price between clones and any recognized brand name. Most of the people I knew then bought one of these as their first machine. 8086, 768K RAM, 10 MB hard disk, two 5 1/4" floppies and a green monitor. Seemed like heaven at the time.
OK, so maybe the Sinclair ZX-80 and its brother the ZX-81 did not sell so well in the US, but the ZX-80 was an amazing machine at the time that was also supplied in kit form. This allowed a poor 13 year old like me to get a computer complete with BASIC for one penny less than 80 UKP which was a real breakthrough at the time.
All the time I lusted after an Apple II, but at well over 300 UKP it was impossible. When the Sinclair machine arrived, I had to wait 10 weeks before it turned up, but after an evening's soldering I had a working machine. Sinclair's lovely quote that you could "Run a nuclear power station with the ZX-80" were well far-fetched with the 1K (!) of RAM, but thanks to tokenising the basic on input, you could actually squeeze a lot more program than you could imagine into it. Oh, did I say that your video RAM was also included in that 1K?
The fact that you could not display output on your TV when the program was running, only at an input prompt or program stop was the best reason in the world to learn assembler for the Sinclair's Z80 processor and this limitation was soon removed by the large user community.
There's still some really strange/dedicated (delete as applicable) Germans running a users club at the ZX-TEAM-Homepage
It was an influential machine and got a lot of young people interested in programming. It should really be somewhere there on the list.
How can Slashdot be regarded as a reputable news source when they post some guy's biased top 10 list when stories about an entire record label putting their content up for download, or cases of Internet fraud, etc. are refused?
Certainly the Amiga and the Atari ST. First 32-bit computers generally available to the masses.
Uhm. The Amiga A1200, A4000, A4000T and CD32 were 32 bit. The other Amigas and the Atari ST were 16 bit computers. Right?
Disclaimer: Some of the "box" Amigas (2000, 2500, 3000) could take 24 bit graphics cards, but they were still 16 bit internally
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
Cool, I actually have one of these, up on a shelf on display. It still works, running DOS 5 with it's single 5.25" floppy. In all reality, though I never had or desired one, where is the original iMac on that list? It did save Apples ass and has got to be up there pretty high on the all-time best selling lists.
Implicit Evaluation with PHP
BBC micro??
My high school had many of these.
I was fortunate enough to have gotten a Tandy Color Computer (CoCo) as a youngin'.
It had a whopping 16k, we had it modded to 32k after a while! Eventually replaced with a CoCo 3
I learned a ton on that little monster!
TRS-80 Model I/III - these affordable computers were the first to have inexpensive networking. They had a multiplexer device avaiable (think hub) that workied through the casette port - one computer could 'save' to another 'loading' computer. Cheap, by clever, flie-level networking for the masses
C-64/TI-99/VIC-20/ATARI 400(800) - The fist mas market computers that broght comuting to people who were more interested in the applications (word-processing and gams) then the computers themselves.
TRS-80 PC-2/SHARP ??? - the first pocket computers, they had a BASIC interpreter and could do normal computing functions and yet fit in your pocket. Link here . The precursors to PDA and 'smart phones'
TRS-80 Model 100 (Kerocera ???) - the first popular laptops.
ATARI ST/AMIGA 1000 - the first true 'multimedia' computers that broght music composition via computers to the masses.
SETI&Home Project - the first virtual supercomputer.
.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I don't know how you rate "most popular." Since computer use has been exploding exponentially, if you do it by user head count, no computer that's more that a couple of years old would count.
So, if you rate computers by their influence or by the affection they inspired, these really ought to be on the list:
The PDP-1. I mean, the MIT hacker community used it to play video games (Spacewar! and Flight Simulator), do word processing (Expensive Typewriter, TECO, and TJ-2), play music (Pete Samson's harmony compiler), etc.
The LINC. The Computer Museum designated this as "the first personal computer." It was a tabletop unit, not floorstanding, and pioneered the first diskette-like storage (the LINCtape stored about 700 half-kilobyte blocks with random access and rewrite-in-place; effectively, a linear diskette with fractional-minute seek time). It was a 12-bit computer, probably the shortest word length ever used before microprocessors.
The Xerox Alto. First WYSIWYG word processor. First compound-document (mixed words and graphics word processor). First "object-oriented" drawing program. First bitmap-editing painting program. Ethernet and local area networking. One user, one computer. I mean, every significant concept in modern-day personal computing was there.
The Dartmouth BASIC time-sharing system. If we ARE talking user head counts--adjusted for exponential growth--the Dartmouth BASIC time-sharing system has to be way up there. How many people used it? How many peole first got the idea that computers should be a working tool for ordinary people by using it? Where did people get the idea that they wanted their own computer, and why they wanted it--so that they could run their own BASIC programs. Hey, how would Bill Gates have known what to write in 1974 if Dartmouth BASIC hadn't been there first?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
the original 128k Macintosh is not listed as #1. Don't get me wrong, it's high on the list, which is good. But this list is sort of like having a Top Ten Rock & Roll Bands List, with the Beatles beaten out by Bruce Springsteen . The original Mac was the 800lb Gorilla, who's presence is still felt today (at least in terms of every computer use by the masses). Love it or hate it, it basically defined the User Experience still in use today.
And dammit, where is my TRS-80?
From the article: 5. MITS ALTAIR 8800
>...but it ultimately gave birth to Microsoft, which helped make PCs available to the masses.
Ah, *that* was the missing link! Finally I am enlightened on how this all happened. My own memory of these things was far messier, until now. I'm glad that history isn't that complicated after all.
Thank you Microsoft! Thank you Mr. Silverman for enlightening me!
I loved this one as I made many of the cards for it... cards which would do really weird things like interface to gas turbines, as I had some projects back then which involved large heavy machinery, and it occured to me that I could program one of these machines to act like a gas turbine, and allow me to check out all the logic of a Gas Turbine Controller without having to power up an actual gas turbine, that is I could read the fuel injector signals, generate a corresponding RPM signal, mimic fuel failure signals, vibration signals, etc. I remember how weird it seemed sitting in the control room of the turbine control room, with the entire room aglow with all sorts of displays indicating the turbine running full power, yet the turbine just down the hall was dead quiet as it was undergoing replacement of its blades.
It was my first taste of having my own programmable device that I understood intimately... and I still have it, albeit I have not used it in years... as I use several old ISA PC's to do this now... ( I like my old Borland 3 C++ compiler for DOS way too much.. it does exactly what I want it to do, and is much quicker for me to get something done than coding in 8080 assembler. And hell, I don't want GUI or its assorted bloatware just to do quickie process simulations. )
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
In the UK, you'd have to at least consider the inclusion of the Sinclair ZX80/81 and the BBC computer from the early 80s. Both were affordable, came with BASIC built in and introduced people to the idea of having a computer in their homes - I was particularly fond of BBC basic which, like many others of my generation, gave me my first programming experience.
That's the Portable ///. The original Compaq was over twice that size and 3 times as heavy. Even the portable // (which used half-height floppy drives!) was much much larger.
Don't you just love people who spout their opinions as fact? You must be one of those "here's a nickel, but yourself a real computer" bigots. Yes, this is flamebait. At least this time I meant it to be. BASIC makes a perfectly good scripting language. And its string manipulations are still quite good comparatively speaking.
Look.
No matter how you slice it, The Tandy "Sensation" was neither important nor popular. That just means the author bought one a few years back.
The PC Unlimited Turbo? Cripes; I would argue any of the PS/2 line was more important than that computer.
The Newton was important, but it isn't a PC, and probably doesn't belong on the list.
The rest are probably right on, but these three computers could only be put on the list by someone with a stomach bigger than their brain.
what about Packard Bell? you totally forgot Packard Bell!
What no PCjr? Brilliant marketing move all around...
-Sean
This one really is an old chestnut.
Short answer: "It depends on your view". They all used the 68k series chips. Every member of that chip family was internally a 32-bit processor, doing 32-bit arithmetic in a single operation. Some chips had external databusses with only 16 (or in some cases 8) bits. The "ST" stood for "Sixteen Thirtytwo", showing it's 16-bit bus and 32-bit architecture.
As far as I'm concerned, if you can hold a 32-bit memory pointer in a single register, manipulate it, and use it as an indirection pointer, it's a 32-bit machine. Others' views differ...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
First cheap IBM PC clone should get a look-in, surely?
I don't think they mean the Newton Message Pad as such, but more PDA's in general. I think computers will get smaller and smaller in the future and perhaps some day we don't need a "personal computer" in the old sense. Just a little portable device that we can connect to a monitor, hook up external gear like keyboard and mouse (or whatever input devices that'll be used in the future). So the Newton Message Pad might be the most importand PC of all time in the future.
I voted for Macintosh though.
Ciryon
10 PRINT "Hello World!"
RUN
I still think people sell it short out of pure snobbery. It has syntax, it follows a flow. It allows the programmer to make it as pretty or ugly as they want to make it. In the end, it still works.
I think the hatred toward BASIC stems from the fact that nobody likes to admit when their pets are needlessly difficult.
If you answered Atari and Amiga, you're wrong! They were never popular.
My first personel computer was a C64. It had a 5.25" disk drive. All of my friends with C64 were dealing with cassette head adjustment. It was cool to have a disk drive.
:)
But; now they all have a life and I'm just posting to Slashdot. I wish I had to deal with cassette head adjustment and found out there were better things to do outside.
Thanks dad, for the disk drive thing.
less is more
It should really be renamed the "the top 10 personal computers of all time in the US".
I emailed someone last night who had brought up some of the history of Apple Computer. They made the statement that the Apple //e lasted in Apple's catalog well into the late 80's.
//e (this would be early 90's).
//e was originally released in January 1983 and was finally discontinued in March of 1995!
I had to correct him - I remembered seeing seeing an Apple catalog listing both the original Powerbook Duo 210 and the Apple
As it turns out, the Apple
The computer, with only a few minor revisions, was sold for over twelve years.
In addition, I was sorry to see that the original iMac did not make the list.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
"Pathetic" is a bit over the top. Each of those machines exerted some major influence and made a mark on the industry.
The TI 99/4 was definitely saddled with a weird "expansion box" which was essentially an empty PC case designed to hold expansion cards (memory, floppy drive, etc.). However, the 99/4 became the darling of early education since it ran LOGO, a programming language that was taught to kindergarten and elementary school children. There's a generation whose first classroom PC was a TI 99/4 running LOGO. TI also spent a lot of money advertising the 99/4 (Bill Cosby was the spokesman) which raised consumer awareness of the existence of PC's for the home.
The Timex/Sinclair was a novelty but also showed the possibilies for cheap and small PC's that could be used by hobbyists on a budget. There are a lot of programmers that cut their teeth on BASIC on the Sinclair
The Adam from Coleco was nearly "pathetic" as far as a PC, but it was a pretty cool gaming console and it had great packaging. It was compatable with nothing, but Coleco bundled it with a lot of stuff. However, if I recall correctly it was a major disaster in terms of sales and took Coleco down with it.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
The Z80 chip could run rings around the Apple 6502 cpu
Erm, it was the other way round.
A 6502 at 1 Mhz could at least control a floppydrive.
When they tried the same trick with a Z80 they needed a 8 Mhz version.
The reason is very simple.
Look at the instructionset.
The shortest instruction on the 6502 was 1 clockpulse,
On the Z80 it was 4 clockpulses.
The longest instruction of the 6502 was 6 clockpulses.
The longest instruction of the Z80 was 24 clockpulses.
Slashdot can be regarded as a reputable news source? Since when? Slashdot does not write news or any other content. They just post links to other suposedly reputable news sources. One cannot expect Slashdot to research all of the detials printed in every story before they post it. That is obsurd.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
You old people and your computers! Am I going to be telling my kids how we used to have those old GigaHertz machines that we used to have to use a keyboard to get information from out heads into the computer?
-----
Make Love not [Browser] War!
What about the ZX Spectrum ? This computer has had lots of influence and has been widely copied in numerous version across all of Europe.
Oh I see, it wasn't an American computer.
My first computer was a PCs Unlimited as mentioned in the article, and I still have the motherboard (picture) to prove it. That computer was a tank--then again, when you're running DOS 3.0 or so, it's hard not to be.
-Paul
I gather that the 68000 (the processor in the Amiga and Atari ST) had a 16-bit data bus, but internally did things in 32-bits. The memory address bus thingy was 24-bits wide, so it could address a 16MB block of memory. An Intel 8086 it definitely wasn't.
The later, 68030-based machines were properly 32-bit. The Atari TT ('Thirtytwo Thirtytwo') could address some silly amount of memory, any memory above the usual ST address space being referred to as 'TT RAM', being extra-speedy as it wasn't accessed by the video hardware and suchlike. I imagine there were similar things with Amigas.
The Amiga deserves a mention in a list of important hardware for being the first true 'multimedia' machine, while the Atari gets a place for being a very impressive (and low-cost) DTP and music workstation...
Except BASIC -is- a programming language. You are incorrect, go back home.
I remember playing Flight Sim on a TRS-80 model I in 1979.
Then playing it on an Atari 400 and Apple II prior to the Commadore 64.
Clearly not researched well, but I suppose he is entitled to an opinion.
Well, the difference between the 6502 and the Z80 is that the 6502 is a very efficient design, that already uses a bit of pipelining. The Z80 is based on a very conservate and simple state machine and takes roughly 4 cycles to do what the 6502 does in ones.
>Its not a programming language. I hope atleast someone reading this learns that fact.
Yes it was. I hope you learn that "at least" is two words.
I loved my Atari 1040ST. Motoralla 68k chip, color GUI, well before the Mac went color. It had builtin MIDI ports, which was the kickstart to the creation of breakthrough software for the production of music (software sequencers). Some of today's biggest names in the computer based musical studio software, including Steinberg (now owned by Pinnacle) and Emagic (now owned by Apple) got their start on the Atari ST with programs (to this day) called Cubase and Logic.
...
I still have it, although it's sitting idle in a display case in my basement. Too many fond memories to let it go
For instance, he includes 'hobby' computers such as the Altair, but excludes the Apple I and his ranking of the Compaq portable PC at number one ahead of the Altair, Apple I and II, Apple Lisa and Macintosh. Interestingly, the author also skips other significant platforms entirely, such as the Amiga and Atari computers
I'm going to play devil's advocate to the prevailing sentiment here a little bit. I'm old enough to remember well the days of the C64, Vic-20, Apple I and II and later the Amiga and Atari XL and ST line (and the straight numbered PC's before them). I remember the industry well in those days, and hell, we had two Atari 520ST's and one Atari 1040ST in my house (I also owned an Apple II and had many friends who owned C64's as well as at least one that owned an Amiga 500).
But the Atari line specifically were not particularly popular computers and they did not have a particularly profound effect on the industry as a whole. Worse, Atari's PC's dropped in popularity pretty linearly with each successive release - the Atari 400 and 800 were fairly major players at first, but as the XL/XE line and then the ST's took over, Atari's influence waned further and further. The ST's did have some nice sound hardware (and were popular with audio professionals) that may have influenced what would eventually become standard in some PC's but otherwise they were basically ignored by average consumers as well as businesses.
The Amiga was ahead of its time - and probably should be on a list like this - but again, it all depends on your criteria. Commercially, the Amiga was a collossal failure that directly contributed to the downfall of Commodore Computers. There are arguments you could make in favor of having it on a top ten list like this, but you'd have to have a pretty loose criteria to include a computer family like the Amiga on the same list as the IBM 5150 - the 5150 being the direct grandfather of about 90% of the world's PC's today, almost 25 years after it was introduced. The Amiga, while still having a cult following, is not even in the same universe in terms of influence or popularity.
As for the Apple I, I don't think even Wozniak and Jobs would really argue it belongs on this sort of list. Only several hundred were made and while it was an important PC to the Apple company just in terms of being their first released product, as a computer taken on its own merits it was not at all important. I mean it's about like arguing Orson Welles' first home movie in high school is as important as Citizen Kane - it frankly and simply is not. Same goes for the Apple Lisa (the largely experimental precursor to the Mac that shares less with the Mac platform than many people seem to believe).
So I don't know; lists like these are pretty much intended to provoke debate through their commissions and omissions (in fact, the writer even says "Of course, there will be grousing with the choices here, and certainly with the order, but that's what makes lists fun"), and there may be different PC's that should or should not be here, but I can see his reasons for not including many of the PC's listed in the article submission.
It seems to me like what this writer did was look at each loose "era" of personal computing - the hobbyist era, the "wild west" era when there were a large variety of low-cost and popular PC options, and the post-IBM PC era when most consumer PC's became largely based on the 5150 design. He then included 3 or 4 PC's from each era on his list, and these all happen to be basically the most popular or important PC's of each era (with one or two exceptions). That's really as good a criteria as any, I think.
BASIC was essentially the UI you got when you powered on the machine, though, and that's probably what the article author was talking about.
It's a fucking Weekend! Go bang some manass!
And Osborne-I a personal computer? What a joke. That machine was only used my professionals.
I think we've establish that a top 10 list for computers won't satisfy anyone. I'd say its not because the list is wrong, merely because there are so many important steps in the developement of the computer. I think a more relevant way of ranking importance would be a top ten list with honorable mentions at each step. This way, other significant advances can be recognized.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Hmm. I wrote a hell of a lot of stuff in it, for all it's being "not a programming language." One was a very full-featured (for its day) BBS for the TRS-80 model I, with a linked-list messaging filesystem including garbage collection, etc, XModem file downloading, and way more features than the leading BBS of the day, which was written for the Apple ][.
My boss when I was in high school wrote his own complete accounting suite and ran his multiple businesses off of it. But if it's not a programming language, I guess that never happened.
He's kissing the spincter.
Probably my 5th computer but the most usefull: it worked 8 (eight) hours on one battery charge. I used it at university for taking notes. I had computers with more impressive specs (amiga 1000, Sinclair QL, ...) but with this laptop (which still works) I learned that PC's dont have to have incredible specs for being usefull. I just bought a Palm Vx. Probably for the same reason: unlimited battery life, light and very dependable.
Jeeze, how could he forget NeXT? Display PS so what you had on the screen was what really printed out, an application development environment that is still one of the best +10 years later, excellent speed thanks to the DSP chip and an user interface to die for. I think they were also the first to ship with ethernet as standard equipment. Yes, no FD, the optical HD and price were a problem but still IMO it belong's in the top five.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
His inclusions are for the most part accurate, but his rankings confuse me.
/. readers would want to read it?
And then, BWJones goes on the rip the article apart.
If it's so bad, why did you think
how many people used one of those? another amazing piece of kit, perhaps bigger in the UK than in the US?
The most important computer to me was the Adage Ambilog 200. First machine I ever saw that digitized sound and could control the video with a joy stick in 1964. The Apple II was just a knock-off. :-)
It was my dad's company's design and primary product. Later he couldn't understand why anyone would want anything better than a Commodore 64.
My vote for most important personal computer would be an IBM 1130. No one would have wanted personal computers unless smaller machines like the 1130 were available to take over during the dead of night for essentially unlimited computing time. That was addictive stuff.
So basically it's a computer that owes it's fame to the fact that it came with MIDI ports whereas an Amiga required a 4.95 cable to achieve the same 'functionality'?
Sorry but we're talking about real computers, not last minute hack jobs.
excludes the Apple I and his ranking of the Compaq portable PC at number one ahead of the Altair, Apple I and II, Apple Lisa and Macintosh
Gee, let me guess, you're an Apple nut, right ?
Sorry, but I fail to see how anyone could rate either the Apple I or the Apple Lisa as one of the "most popular" PCs of all time. Both were more or less irrelevant by any standard (the Apple I was not made in really large numbers, and the Lisa was so expensive as to be essentially ignored) making it impossible to call either "popular". Just because both were forerunners of popular computers does not make them popular by themselves. Next made a computer that is in some ways the technical forerunner of today's Macs, and I don't think anyone would claim that these were popular computers either (although a MUCH better case could me made for the Next boxes, these were very much coveted in certain - but small - circles in their day).
And one computer that was sorely missing was the Sinclair ZX-81, that thing sold a ton and it was if I recall the first personal computer under $100 (or was it $200) ?
My first computer I had access to was the Tandy Model II and a III at my High school.
Wrote my first computer games in basic on it, 32K of memory and the Z-80 processor. Built my first little microcomputer project based on the Z-80 cpu.
Then got my first computer a Tandy Color Computer II, 16K of memory. Upgraded the machine myself to 32K, then later to 64K.
At first did not have a storage device and would type in sample programs and keep the computer on until I got tired of the program.
First storage device was a tape player, then moved up to a floppy disk drive 320K storage!
Then my first Hard drive was a 10 Meg Western digital drive, in access the hard drive I ran a OS call OS-9 from Microware. It was a UNIX based multitasking OS, learn to program with C on a style UNIX system.
Also started do custom hardware building for my computer, built a Laser light show system, Real time video digitizer.
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
...and serving as the butt of jokes for its lame handwriting recognition
Uhh....come again?
I cried when that machine died. But my mourning period was short - as my parents (thankfully) replaced that 400 with an 800XL, and I finally got to use a decent keyboard (the 400 had a craptacular chiclet keyboard).
I can't help but wonder what my life would've been like had my parents NOT got me that 400 for Christmas, so many years ago. I know they scrimped and saved for it, and I'm thankful for that and all the other great things they've done for me. I hope I can live up to their example and do the same for my two kids.
Sniff. Can you feel the love in here? Sniff.
He never says anything like that in the article. It's his "Top Ten Most Important" computers. Way different than most popular. I was going to guess the original iMac based on the article header, but it was completely misleading. Bah.
Nerd Rock In Progress
the newton STILL does things pdas of today don't. it eats batteries like skittles, but its still ahead of its time today.
commodore 64... trs80... apple ][... dec rainbow... these machines are what i remember tons of people having.
and the 128k macintosh to boot.
By the time the Sensation! came out, customers were pretty accustomed to computers. Windows 3.1 was around, and while the $2,200 tag wasn't bad, it wasn't THAT much cheaper than the other computers. Packard Bell and Leading Edge were still around then as I recall, and those would have been cheaper (though garbage).
TRS-80, Amiga, Timex/Sinclair, TI99, Commodore Pet, GRiDPad, Coleco Adam, and many others have just as much business on that list as anything he put there.
I had an Adam, and wrote many programs for it using 40-col SmartBasic. It could really "calculate", back before we spent all our time and money on the GUI. I wrote one program that was supposed to take all nite to run, before an answer was reached, but even at 4 mhz, it got through in about 15 minutes. I tried to come up with something that would keep the machine busy. I thought that Adam was so fast that it took only a blink to do something, then it was my turn, inputing at the keyboard. So I wrote a basic program to see how long it would take for a small sum of money (about $5.00) to reach a million dollars if deposited in a savings account. I had the Adam step through the program, a "savings account quarter" at a time, and dump the results to the screen. Very interesting. Took forever to get any money at all, then, eventually, things snowballed. Seemed to prove that the rich get richer alright. Answer? About 1000 years to reach one million dollars. Loved that Adam.
At the time it was never really popular with the "home computer enthusiast" community. It was too expensive, had a tiny little b/w screen, no games, little software support and the GUI was not something seen as necessary to folks raised on a command line.
If anything the original Apple II was like the Beatles.
Sinclair ZX Spectrum (the machine that the UK games industry was founded on)
Apple Mac+ (when the Mac actually became *useable*)
Commodore 64
IBM PC
Apple ][
Atari ST (if you were musically inclined in the '80s and '90s)
Psion Series 3 (the first palmtop that you could actually do anything useful with)
Altair
Apple iMac DV (computer as form *and* function, not just grey box)
Commodore Amiga
You must think in Russian.
He was probably thinking of a different chip. The Z80, in it's day, was a very good processor, and the Z8000 was just as good. Zilog just suffered from bad marketing. But they still managed to sue their way to the mid to late 90's when companies started using the Z80 again (Texas Instruments calculators and Sega Genesis, just to name two).
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Here is my list and reasons:
1. IBM PC - Market took off like a rocket
2. Apple II - with Visicalc Market was created
3. Compaq 386 - Market began to leave IBM behind
4. Compaq Portable - Niche Market starts up
5. Apple Mac - Dawn of GUI
6. White Box PC clones - Market priced to masses
7. Atari 800 - Niche
8. Amiga
Of course many of you may not go back that far, but for those in the heyday of the PC industry (1980s when you could not sell enough IBM PCs) this is a pretty good list of the most important.
You never forget your first--this post's for you, D.
Dismissed as a toy by "serious" computer users at its 1984 launch, it inspired Gates and Microsoft to move away from the text-based MS-DOS and push the copycat Windows found on the vast majority of PCs in use today.
Apple Rules...
The package said "Windows XP or better. Pentium Class Processor or better"... So I got a Mac with OS X
And this was the feature that made it possible for the Apple II to have a low-cost floppy drive. Steve Wozniak designed a "dumb" floppy controller, using only a handful of chips, that worked by using the Apple II's cpu as the controller. The fact that the cpu directly read individual bits off the floppy and controlled the floppy hardware at a low level made possible some truly baroque copy-protection schemes.
The Apple II was also the only PC of its time to offer a true bit mapped "color" display--another of Wozniak's innovations. Every other PC of the time had only character-mapped graphics. This feature made the Apple the game machine of its era, although as with the floppy drive, everything from sprite movement to the individual cycles of the speaker had to be controlled directly by the cpu.
He's also wrong in claiming they were the first 32 bit systems available. I hate articles like this because nobody ever mentions any computers from outside of the United States.
;)
The Amiga 1200 was launched in December 1992 but before that a British company called Acorn Computers released the Archimedes range of computers, the next generation after their 8 bit systems (Atom, BBC A/B/B+, Master, Master Compact). Starting with the A305, A310, A410 & A440 in mid 1989 these machines had 32bit ARM2 processors (from which the Intel XScale/StrongARM chips out now originated), the Arthur (later RISCOS (Screenshot) operating system in ROM (instant bootup!), wonderful GUI, built in BBC Basic and easy ARM assembler access, 8 channel stereo sound, etc.
My first computer was a BBC B in 1982 (which should have been mentioned for it's incredible robustness and shedload of I/O ports.. you could link it to anything, oh and for being the machine the original version of Elite was written for) to an Acorn A3000 in 1990, before going PC 94'ish. Shortly after Linux appeared so all was ok again
--- Commission free trading & free stock up to $500 - use http://share.robinhood.com/kelvinp6
Where is the Amstrad PC1512. At one time it had 25% of the PC market. OK so it was a bit strange with custom slots but it worked well, had colour graphics. Very good machine for its day. Also it had GEM which was at least differenet (and better) than Windows 1.0
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
The Amiga was a fanstastic machine, way ahead of it's time.
However, the world ignored the Amiga. It's influence on today's machine is negligable.
Amiga style light weight multitasking never caught on. Machines just became fast enough to not need it. No machines today that support multiple resolutions simultaneously. Native NTSC timing died with the Amiga as well.
The article lists the personal computers the writer believes are the most "important". I.e., it's his opinion.
/. has sworn off using editors, but at least the staff might try using their brains.
Our hapless submitter changed that to most "popular", which is an entirely different thing, of course. And, easily determined by looking at sales records.
I know
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
As a Houstonian, I've made the mistake of reading Dwight Silverman's column on many occations. Rarely does he offer any insight... or know what he's talking about for that matter.
Compaq are very important in computing history, since they were the company to clone the PC BIOS and start off the whole PC compatible movement. Had they failed or been legally kicked off the job, the computing landscape would look very different today. Better or worse is hard to say, but certainly different.
Cheers,
Ian
It was PC Limited, not PCS Unlimited. I remember how fast a 12 MHz machine seemed.
A couple of classic portable machines:
Radio Shack Model 100 - every writer had one, and although very limited especially compared with what's available today, it served its purpose admirably well as the tool it was intended to be.
Hewlett-Packard HP-35 scientific calculator.
Introduced in January 1972, this electronic sliderule in your pocket with Reverse Polish Notation shook the engineering and scientific communities, as anyone worth his salt had to have one. The geek factor was off the charts, it was built like a tank, and it was a very efficient workhorse. Some are still in use today.
The BBC and Sinclair computers were very popular in Australia too, with many schools purchasing the BBCs in particular. I had a BBC B as my first computer. It was a wonderful way to learn about computers - an excellent semi-procedural basic (GOSUB was new back then), a 6502 assembler built into the basic interpreter, a decent sound chip and OKish graphics.
The article does not indicate the guy really was involved in the early days of computing - it seems he filled in the blanks based on research more than being out there in the field.
I'm not sure what he means by "most important" - that's the caveat. "Most important" based on him browsing through advertisements in old issues of Byte magazine probably.
Clearly, the TRS-80 should be among the list. It was the first successfully-marketed and mass-produced PC.
The Kaypro should also be listed - it was more "important" than the Compaq portable. Though I still have a Compaq portable III with the gas plasma display in a closet somewhere - that was an innovative computer for the time, but it was following in the footsteps of the Kaypro and earlier portables. NEC, from my memory came out with the first mass-produced computer that would be considered a "laptop" - I had one of those as well. I forget the name - but it's worthy of the list.
The Compaq worthy of mention in the list would be the Compaq 386 - the first at the time to take advantage of the faster processor - ahead of IBM.
I would also note that the TRS80 Model II was the first mass-produced PC that was geared for hard core business use, even though it didn't do well (and there were others like Cromemco that were popular - not sure if those were legiti microcomputers or minis - my memory isn't what is used to be).
Other notable mentions: Timex/Sinclair - the first ultra-cheap, bare bones PC; the Texas Instruments TI99/4a, the Commodore Pet, Tandy Color Computer, and probably many more I'm forgetting.
I actually thought it was a very well done list, but the "Tandy Sensation"?? I vaguely recall the initial hype when that model came out - and ultimately, nobody considered it a really "sensational" turning-point in home computing. If you're going to list the most significant Radio Shack/Tandy computer product, I think you'd be much smarter to list the Model 3 or Model 4. Those were among the first personal computers to offer networking, with a designated "server" system (and everything interconnected via serial cables). This made them very popular in school computer labs, where lots of middle schoolers and high-schoolers got their first real opportunity to use a computer. A huge (5 megabyte!) external hard drive could be attached to them, as well as external 300 baud modems, daisy wheel or dot matrix printers, and many other accessories. (For a while, they even offered a punch-card reader add-on for the Model 3.)
... but as the author said, making a cut-off point of "top 10" always forces you to leave out some good stuff. The Timex/Sinclair, great as it was, didn't really seem like it helped hook "the masses" on computing. It started out being sold in kit form as the ZX-81, and that model only appealed to hard-core electronics enthusiasts. Even when the TS1000 was selling in K-Mart for $99.95, the tiny, flat membrane keyboard kept lots of people away from it.
My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair 1000, so I would have loved to see it make the list too
On the other hand, you are right, the Z80 had a 4 cycly minimum instruction length, with each memory ddess adding 3 cycles, but the Z80 usually run close to 4 MHz (e.g. 3.5 MHz on the ZX Spectrum). It had 5 pairs of GPRs, plust a shet of shadow GPRs, and it supported 16-bit reigster addressing and arithmetic. So in general, a 3.5 MHz Z80 was far superior to the 1MHz 6502. The current x86 instruction set is the derivative of the i8080 instruction set, which is a subset of the Z80 instruction set.
Huh? The Genesis/Megadrive used a Motorola 68k as it's primary CPU.
I'm still trying to figure out all its modes of operations, but it's a classic still.
--
The Amiga's way of working was similar; if you were taking over the machine at the lowest level (which, being a games programmer, I did), you actually had to implement the MFM encoding of the bitstream sent to or read from the disc. (Yet another use for the blitter.)
On a game I did for a major French publisher (this was in the late '80s) I created a disk format so arcane that the disc duplicating company couldn't duplicate them until I explained how to reprogram their duplicators :-)
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
Also- the SimCity that was available for the C64 was incredibly crippled compared to its Amiga and IBM PC counterparts. It had horrible graphics (a square with a letter in it to indicate zone, rather than graphics of buildings), and was missing major gameplay elements.
Somehow, I still spent a million hours playing it.
Strangely, although RISC OS limped on to this millennium [along with a much-changed AmigaOS], home PC OS'es have commoditised down to Windows vs. UNIX (Linux/*BSD/Mac OS X) with no other OS'es even getting a look in. Ditto with the hardware, which is basically Intel/AMD vs. Power PC.
And a Z80 for its sound CPU. I think it used two actually.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Let's not forget the DOZENS of arcade games that used, and STILL USE Z80 processors. IIRC, the Gameboy is based on Z80's as well.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
ill fun circles around anyone care to try!
They were all 486sx's when 486dx's were taking over. Not a multimedia dreamhouse. Especially if you wanted to play doom or run FreeBSD. ( Didn't hear of linux until a few years later oddly enogh)
http://saveie6.com/
Thank god someone finally mentioned Acorns!
I remember many hours of geeky schoolyard fights between a group of us.. One person had a Mac, one had an Amiga, one had a PC (yeah, i know, but that's what everyone knows a windows box as)
I had a trusty Acorn A4000... The arguments were never settled:
Amiga lad was, well, and Amiga owner.. i can still spot them today..
The Mac had blatently ripped off the Acorn desktop, and the hours of grief he got for having only one mouse button was amazing...
The PC was crappily slow compared to the raw power of my 12Mhz RISC monster (he had a 486SX25)
The Acorn ruled supreme for a short while, then the PC finally overtook in my eyes, Acorn gave a small fight with the Risc-Pc, but it was too late...
Still nice to hear them appreciated on Slashdot though, they were damn good little machines, and I still venture into the loft and see if mine is still running..
It's kind of scarey that these are the same people that write our newspapers and history books. And michael is probably the type that purchases educational materials for schools and libraries. I'll bet he's never SEEN an Apple-1 in his life! Neither one seems to remember the PET/CBM, or the Kaypro line of computers, both of which probably had more models than Apple had 1's.
This whole posting is crap. Mod me down for pointing it out.
I might be wrong on this, but wasn't SimCity originally a Mac game? It certainly wasn't a C-64 original. So did this guy just find advertisements for 10 old computers and decide to write an article about them?
Oh, come on! The ENIAC was a beaut! All you would need to house it would be an extra garage...
I used to be a full-blown /\miga Fanatic... I was eventually forced to switch to a PeeCee after C= died and it wqaqs obvious that there would not be another Amiga (still have my Amiga 2000).
But imagine my frustration when I switched from a 14MHz Amiga to a Pentium 166 MMX (best at the time)...
Switching from a Realtime OS with a *NIX style CLI to a POS (M$ Win*) was a major problem for me. I had become used to the system responding at my command (something I enjoyed after having to deal with my first computer...a C= 64) and using the many advantages of the *NIX command line...
Of course, Linux now has the new preempt patch in the 2.6 kernel which makes me extremely happy...
I was running a TI-99a in 1981 - and I consider it a more common machine than the Osborne (which I never saw or heard about until the 1990s).
Where is the Atari? The Atari 800XL was an awsome machine - on par with the Commodore 64. After learning basic on the TI-99, I later used the Atari to learn machine level programming, poking and peeking (or was it push and pop?)my way into the guts of the beast.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Ummm....the TRS-80 laptop that I have in my possesion is based on the Intel 8085 chip................. That is not the same as a Z80 by any stretch of the imagination.......
Just to add my two cents: the Z80 is a really fantastic chip, very easy to get your head around and understand at the register level.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
As much as I am an Apple fan (I have no less than six Apple IIs in my basement at the moment), the Apple II's graphics paled in comparison to the C64's. Bitmapping is great, but it didn't allow fast graphics w/o top level programming, and with no sprites (shape tables don't count!), by the mid to late 1980s, the Apple II just couldn't keep up with the C64.
That all said, the Apple II's graphics (which use two-part sub pixel rendering to create colors) are a LANDMARK of efficiency and elegance of design (or a really awesome hack, depending on your point of view). Although the screen's resolution is 280 x 192, when using color graphics, it was effectively 140 x 192.They also look great in monochrome, and stunning ugly in color. But they kick the sh*t out of any other PC from 1977 (see also: TRS-80 Model 1)!
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
The Z80 and 6502 were roughly equivalent in processing power. In any given year, the Z80's clock speed was twice that of the 6502's and took about twice as many clocks to get a given job done. The 6502's instruction set was a bit more cleverly efficient; the Z80 had more registers and some powerful instructions.
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The Model 3 and 4 were weaklings compared to the Model 16, a 68000-based behemoth that ran Microsoft XENIX. A Unix workstation on your desktop that you could buy from Radio Shack! Of course, it cost almost as much as a car, but still...
The Model 16 had a hybrid 68000/Z80 based architecture. You could boot your old Model II TRSDOS disks with it, but the real fun lay in XENIX. Unless you wanted to do graphics. The extra memory XENIX demanded (I think you could go up to half a meg) meant no room for the graphics video card.
The Model 16 was great nonetheless. I learned to program ASM in TRSDOS and C in XENIX on one of those things.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Breakfast served all day!
What is sad is that I actually still have one of those Compaq 'luggable' PC at my parents house. And with the boot floppy it still boots!
A computer in every closet
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
In a computer market that is growing and has choice (like the one we currently have), the "top 10 personal computers of all time" are... ...the top 10 currently selling.
Nice use of the word K-Rad. That sort of lost popularity as the Internet got more popular. Thanks for reminding me of it.
Let's not forget that the C64s graphics paled in comparison to the Atari 400/800
Ligaguinggligagiggagoogoogwillgo
Nintendo paid the company who paid royalties to Zilog. That's the only way Zilog lasted until now, was in court.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Why such fuss about a journo having it off with himself! The most skippable of articles surely must be journalist's opinions, "investigations" or (dare they call it) "research". The press and web is full of these convulsions of the lowest of the low. These creatures are on par with salivating real estate agents and noise-spewing car salesmen. Utterly irrelevant!
"Sprite engines" for the Apple II were implemented entirely in software. Because there was no way to rapidly write an arbitrary sprite to the screen at an arbitrary bit position independent of byte boundaries (not to mention the Apple II's awkward pixel position dependent color scheme) sprites had to be stored as tables of pre-shifted bitmaps (these are the "shape tables" you mention) for every possible position within a byte. Fortunately, another one of the strengths of the 6502 was very fast table lookup. Early games used an XOR scheme, which allowed the background to be restored by rewriting the same sprite, but produced ugly artifacts where colors overlapped. Later games used buffers to restore the background. Add-on hardware sprite boards never penetrated significantly into the market, and were not widely used by games.
As much as I am an Apple fan (I have no less than six Apple IIs in my basement at the moment), the Apple II's graphics paled in comparison to the C64's.
Yes, later home computers like the Commodore 64 and Amiga and the Atari 800 made game programming much easier, as they provided hardware sprites, background scrolling, and simple sound synthesizers, all of which had to be implemented in software on the Apple II. For an Apple II game to be monitoring an analog joystick, playing a recognizable tune, and moving multiple "sprites" around on the screen was a real tour de force of assembly language programming.
1. IBM PC.
Most PCs are an evolution of this machine. It was an open architecture, very flexible, and built like a truck.
2. Apple Macintosh
Most of what you see in modern PCs were first made available in this machine and it's successors.
3. Apple II
This made personal computers popular, leading to the IBM PC. A complete open architecture, it was the favorite among a new breed of hackers.
4. Osborne I. The first luggable, leading to the laptop marketplace of today.
5. Tandy TRS-80 Models I & III.
This was the first inexpensive, mass marketed PC. Many small businesses loved the Model III, despite it's flaws.
6. C64
This was the most popular mass marketed PC. Simple yet technically better than the Apple II. But a more closed platform means that the hackers never looked at in in the same light as the Apple II.
--- There is a lot of love for the following machines, but they didn't change the world as much as the computers above the line. ---
7. Sinclair ZX-80. This was an inexpensive, mass marketed PC, extremely popular in Europe.
8. Atari ST series. Very popular, especially in Europe, but it was the last of the breed. It could have been a mac killer if it was more refined and not associated via a game company.
9. Amiga series. Very popular with hackers, but it just couldn't get into the mainstream. It wasn't as popular as the Atari ST series, but technically it was a "better Macintosh". But Apple could afford a long-term development strategy that Commodore could not.
10. TI-99/4A. Very popular and inexpensive. But since it was a very closed platform, it never had the chance to grow significantly beyond the grip of TI.
---
Of course, all these machines had important precursors... those earlier machines, including the Altair and (later) the Apple I and countless others led to the industry we have today. They were the seeds to get things started.
What, me worry?
I'm afraid not. Shape tables were an entirely different type drawing, that resembled vector graphics. Though the shape itself could only be defined with 90 degree angles, IIRC, it could, once defined be resized and rotated freely (IIRC the rotation unit wasn't degrees [360/circle], but 256/circle) It's been a while, but I believe the relavant Applesoft commands were DRAW, SIZE, ROT
They were completely different from the preshifted bitmaps you describe, which were neither resizable not rotatable. A shape's lines remained the same thickness not matter what size it was drawn in.
Oh, you are talking about the Applesoft shape tables. Those were basically useless for animated games, because Applesoft was just too slow. Hardly any games used Applesoft, except for some early turn-based adventure-type and strategy games (I think one of the first games in the Ultima series used Applesoft).
...really stuck in my mind when it came along with the TRS-80, the first widespread available microcomputer. I mean, to buy an Apple II or a Commodore PET, you had to go to specialized boutiques (read: nerd heaven). But since you had Radio-Shacks almost at every street corner and most/all of them had a TRS-80 on display, this computer was the first one that was as "available", visible to the masses.
In these days of computers at Wall-Mart and Price Club/Costco *and* CD-ROMs in your cereals, I guess the younger crowd here don't realize how significant this was.
But coming back to this peripheral: I'm talking about the re-badged Centronics 733 that RS sold along the TRS-80. Man, 2000$ CDN, could only print in one direction, no lower case and ***very*** approximative tabulation. IOW, don't even attempt to get properly lined-up columns!
And be sure never to open the ribbon container because you'd have to put it all back in... Ugh, that ink took *days* to come off your fingers.
It really bowls me over when I see ~300$ 12PPM laser printers capable of PostScript emulation. We have definitively (sp?) come very far.
Yes, yes, advances in storage/audio/video/42 are significant, but still, this printer thing is one of those details that kinda hits you, you know...
I find it interesting that their number one choice is the COMPAQ PORTABLE PC, a computer that was designed and built in houston. I guess the Houston Chronical is proud of Houston's contribution to the PC revolution.
But the 6502 only had 3 8-bit registers! It did not have any registers that could fully hold an address
True but it had special address modes which allowed it to access locations in the zeroth page using an eight bit address which saved a clock cycle when loading the data from the address. Also, there were address modes to allow you to do indirect addressing off pairs of zero page locations. This gave the programmer 128 address registers (albeit slow ones) to play with.
Yes the Z80 had 16 bit arithmetic, but IIRC the internal data paths were 8 bit (like the 6502) so there wasn't much speed advantage. And the registers were not general purpose. Each register/register pair behaved slightly differently in some way.
Oh and the 1MHz 6502 was contemporary with the 2 MHz Z80. There was a 2MHz 6502 which was more or less contemporary with the 4MHz Z80.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
The Z-80 had had a huge number of registers compared to the 6502. In addition to the accumulater(A) and flag(F) registers it contained 4 more general purpose 8 bit registers that could be combined and used as 16 bit registers (pairs B-C and D-E) In addition it contained to indirection registers IX and IY which worked the same way that they did on the 6502 (That is your 128 memory registers (actually 256: 127 forward or -128 backwords.)) The IX and IY registers could also be used as a 16 bit pair. All of these registers had a shadow counterpart (A' F' B' C' D' E' IX' and IY') which could be used for a primitive form of fast context switching without having to resort to the stack or to memory. The accumlator also had a special fast refresh register which automatically stored the previous result. The only use that I have ever seen suggested for it was to seed random functions. Storing data in registers is by far the fastest and if you could make you program function working with your data in all of the GPRs, you could really outperform the 6502. It was also faster to do BCD arithmatic because you could use the B-C D-E 16 bit register pairs (even if it took two memory fetch instructions). Another great advantage to the Z80 was you could load the the GPRs serialy. This made it easy to work with serial connections such as the TI's peer to peer interface. It had 8 ports and (I think) more interrupt levels then the 6502.
Their are two problems with indirection registers. First, the values are stored outside of the CPU which meant that it took more cycles to retrieve. Second the instruction took at least two cycles to complete because whereas a GPR instruction can be down with a single bit, indirect registers take at least two bits -- the instruction itself and the offset. That means that ALL operations had to be at least 2 bits. That meant that accessing the registers on the 6502 was slower then accessing the stack.
If the Z-80 was a CISC style processor for its time, the 6502 was the RISC alternative. Two index registers and an accumulter (IX, IY, and A respectively) provided a bare bones processor. I think that in the end what really made it more appealing was that since you couldn't optimize it for only using internal registers anyway you never really had to worry about where store you data in the registers -- it would always stay in the same offset in memory. Even though the indirect registers were their on the Z-80 I never really paid much attention to them because they were slower. It could be a headache to remember were in the registers or on the stack you had placed you data last so that you didn't write over it before you were done using it.
I suspect that is what the differences between the x86 (which gradually evolved from the 8085 instruction set which was only slightly smaller then the Z-80's) and the PPC processors must seem like. I have not programmed in assembly since the 386. I have never had the opertunnity to work with the 68000 or PPC but I imagine that they must be more like programming the 6502 was. If anybody has programmed at the systems level for these architectors maybe they could provide me with some insight?
What really impressed me about the Apple]['s graphic s was the way that they were mapped into normal memory so that the graphics card actually performed the refresh cycle for the dynamic ram. I really showed Woz's genius. It is one of the best examples of engineering were a technological weakness has been turned on its head and actually used as an advantage in the design.
The Sega Game Gear also used a Z80. Yeah, I still have mine, but it eats batteries for breakfast ;-)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Show me where they are claiming to be a "reputable news source"?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It wasn't the chip that determined the best computer, it was software for the platform --
like which one had the most games of professional wrestling.
Hey what about the kaypro. i still have one in my garage. and i broke my apple II playing karatica. nut i eventually ended up working on a zeuse. cpm bassed system using the z80 proccesor. how about those.
Hangon, I make a perfectly accurate statement, get modded down as a troll, you spuw out some random garbage and get modded up? you got to be fucking kidding me!
moo
I concede that Applesoft was hideously slow, and was rarely used in games, however, since it was already in ROM, many assembly programs called its routines, especially in the first few years, and expecially if they wanted a vector graphics look. A programmer could get better speed and flexibility (e.g. shapes that used none-right angles), with custom code, but many either didn't bother, or found that their more full-featured code taxed the 6502 and settled on the existing compromise. This was back in the day when trimming 100 bytes off a program was considered a big win, because the 'standard' configuration was (gasp) 16 K of RAM -K!- of combined program and data space, and 48K was the official maximum (third party bank-switched slot cards that allowed a total of 64K were common, but far from universal)
I just wanted to preserve the correct use of the term "shape table", because misuse could confuse the discussion. The term had been pre-empted by Apple, so it was never used for anything else back then. What some are calling "shape tables" today were called e.g. "preshifted bitmaps" or one of the other (at least) 7 separate techniques in wide use by 1982 (I don't recall all the names)
...in (almost) every school in the UK. Pretty much each and every British geek of my generation (i.e. born in the early '70's) cut their computing teeth on first the 6502 BBC Micro, then the Acorn Archimedes.
Things really turned around with the 68K and PPC; They have a ton of registers and pipelines.
The 68K had a generalized set of eight data and eight address registers (one of which was the program counter), as well as two stack pointers. It also had a 3-stage fetch, decode, execute pipeline. This CPU was a dream to write assembly for.
The registers and arithmetic were 32bit, but the address bus and ALU were 16bit. 16bit instruction words did make code more compact and faster, though.
The PPC, I haven't written asm for so I'm not entirely sure about it beyond the fact that it has an enormous register set that completely dwarfs Intel's.